URBAN rats seemingly unaffected by trays of poison have been causing frustration for residents in Barrow town centre.

The brazen rats, which have so far eaten four trays of rat poison to no ill effect, have been spotted a number of times by residents living in the Buccleuch Street and Manchester Street area of Barrow.

Resident Angela Priestley said she has contacted the council and Barrow MP John Woodcock's office but has not seen anyone visiting the street.

She said: "There has been lots of sightings around this area; Buccleuch Street, Manchester Street, Emlyn and Carlisle Street.

"The last sighting was Saturday 5pm on Manchester Street when one ran out from the derelict building nextdoor to the Olympic when there was children playing out.

"We have them up our end of Buccleuch Street in the back street and my mum had them at hers further down in Buccleuch Street.

"We have been feeding them as much poison as possible but can't leave it unattended because of other animals.

"We have contacted the environmental health officer and also John Woodcock but haven't seen anyone around trying to sort this problem out yet."


Dr Dave Cowan, leader of the wildlife programme at the Food and Environment Research Agency, has analysed previous studies to try to estimate a total population of urban rats.

"Rats are almost completely commensal in Britain, [meaning] they're associated with human activities. That gives us a start because we only really need to think about how many rats there might be living in close proximity to ourselves.

"It's pretty rare that rats are inside our dwellings. Less than half a per cent of dwellings have rats," he says.

In those cases, "it would be just a couple of rats".

A better figure to take is the number of dwellings that have rats outside, in the garden or driveway or compost heap and so on, Cowan suggests.

"Around 3% of our dwellings have rats present outside. We can come up with a figure of 1.5 million rats in total in Britain in or around our homes."

The next place they are likely to live is in commercial premises like warehouses, factories and shops.

"There are about 1.8 million commercial premises in Britain. A survey suggested around 5% of those commercial premises had rats present. Again, each presence was a relatively small number of animals. The total estimate for the number of rats in and around commercial premises is around 200,000."

Then we have the place most of us associate with rats - the sewers.

"This is a bit tricky to estimate," says Cowan. "There is an estimate of 16,000 square kilometres of sewers in Britain. And around 5% of the sewers have rats present.

"In the 1950s people were allowed to go down and count rats in the sewers. From that work, we had an estimate of around 2,000 rats per square kilometre of sewer".

If you multiply those two figures you get a figure of around 1.6 million rats in sewers, and a total of 3.3 million rats in urban environments.

"That's the streetwise, urban rats - between 3 and 3.5 million in total," says Cowan.